Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By : Raimon Ràfols Montane
Book Image

Building Android UIs with Custom Views

By: Raimon Ràfols Montane

Overview of this book

To build great user interfaces for your Android apps that go beyond the standard UI elements, you need to use custom Android views. With these, you can give your app a distinctive look and ensure that it functions properly across multiple devices. This book will help you construct a great UI for your apps by teaching you how to create custom Android views. You will start by creating your first Android custom view and go through the design considerations. You will then see how the right choices will enable your custom view to perform seamlessly across multiple platforms and Android versions. You will create custom styleable attributes that work with Android XML layouts, learn to process touch events, define custom attributes, and add properties and events to them. By the end of this book, you will be able to create apps with custom views that are responsive and adaptable to make your app distinctive and an instant hit with its users.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen the reasoning behind why we might want to build custom views and layouts, but also, that we have to apply common sense. Android provides a great basic framework for creating UIs and not using it would be a mistake. Not every component, button, or widget has to be completely custom developed, but by doing it so in the right spot, we can add an extra feature that might make our application remembered. Also, we've shown some examples of applications that are already in the market and they're using custom views, so we know we are not alone out there! Finally, we've seen how to set up the environment to get ourselves started and we began taking our own first baby steps on custom views.

In the next chapter, we'll keep adding features; we'll see how to calculate the right size of our custom view and learn more about custom rendering.